Manifesto of Futurist Architecture

“We must invent and rebuild the Futurist city like an immense and tumultuous shipyard, agile, mobile and dynamic in every detail; and the Futurist house must be like a gigantic machine. The lifts must no longer be hidden away like tapeworms in the niches of stairwells; the stairwells themselves, rendered useless, must be abolished, and the lifts must scale the lengths of the façades like serpents of steel and glass. The house of concrete, glass and steel, stripped of paintings and sculpture, rich only in the innate beauty of its lines and relief, extraordinarily “ugly” in its mechanical simplicity, higher and wider according to need rather than the specifications of municipal laws. It must soar up on the brink of a tumultuous abyss: the street will no longer lie like a doormat at ground level, but will plunge many stories down into the earth, embracing the metropolitan traffic, and will be linked up for necessary interconnections by metal gangways and swift-moving pavements.

The decorative must be abolished. The problem of Futurist architecture must be resolved, not by continuing to pilfer from Chinese, Persian or Japanese photographs or fooling around with the rules of Vitruvius, but through flashes of genius and through scientific and technical expertise. Everything must be revolutionized. Roofs and underground spaces must be used; the importance of the façade must be diminished; issues of taste must be transplanted from the field of fussy moldings, finicky capitals and flimsy doorways to the broader concerns of bold groupings and masses, and large-scale disposition of planes. Let us make an end of monumental, funereal and commemorative architecture. Let us overturn monuments, pavements, arcades and flights of steps; let us sink the streets and squares; let us raise the level of the city.”

The Futurist Manifesto can be considered as one of the first models that calls into question the validity of conservative systems. Against the immobility of the thought of the time, Filippo Marinetti proposed to resort to speed, movement and aggressiveness. The fascination with cars and their acceleration meant the perfect allegory to explain a future in permanent transformation.

Futurism emerged as a reaction against the academicism prevailing in Italy. Its translation to architecture is realized by the Manifesto of the Futuristic Architecture by Antonio Sant’Elia. He realizes a harsh criticism against neo-classicism and against all movement that implies a historical continuity, a “struggle against the coward prolongation of the past.” Facing the linearity of history advocates a profound change based on the new mechanical world, its materials and technology. Monumentality, heaviness and those static elements will be replaced by lightness, the ephemeral and the fast.

This last manifesto is possibly the first description of a future-oriented architecture, where expiration and transience will replace stability. Thus, time is introduced for the first time in architecture as a new factor that will forever transform its static and immutable conception. For Sant’Elia houses had to last less than people and cities less than human generations. In this way the futuristic architecture was advanced many years to the emergence of the systemic architecture, since it was conceived like a process in constant renewal and transformation.